Mirrored Realities
by The Carnivorous Muffin
Summary: In which Light Yagami reflects on the game called Life played with black notebooks and clever half-lies. In the end he is all his faces. AU


There are things which are left unsaid and unwhispered. They are shadows clinging to the wallpaper and hiding beneath the furniture. They crawl. Something there is that doesn't love the light. It creeps and it crawls, a secret, or a word.

It is ignored for the most part, dusted over and put delicately into corners, carefully looked over as if it were nothing more than dust. But it waits and it waits and it looks and it crawls. It is the smell of pine in the closet, a scarlet thread, a half marred foot print, and the soft blade of moonlight shining through the window.

It is the subtle things, the things glossed over and forgotten. Yet it is there and it remains. Silent and crawling it watches through half lidded golden eyes and speaks of things unspoken.

* * *

The dim starlight watched the open window as the curtains billowed inward. The streetlamps kept their guard against the night. The frost crackled against the window panes and the earth. An errant breeze rippled the scene and the window remained open.

When Sachiko walked in the room was cold. She rubbed her arms and made her way to the window, she closed it shut and then she looked in the crib. There was a shadow there. She heard a cry. She breathed in relief and she left.

The air smelled of pine.

If asked she would not remember the details or even the moment. It was a moment of fear that roused her, a moment of Oh-God-I-am-afraid, a mother's fear. She rushed in, the details blurred against her smudging feet. She heard the cry and that was enough.

There could be no old magic in this land of iron towers.

The old magic was dead.

(There were shadows on the wall and shadows on the bed and shadows in his newborn's eyes…)

* * *

There were certain items he did not touch. There was a pattern in his hesitant fingers that edge close then fade. He was the first to notice. It was like a dance, he reached out blindly and then he edged away, no longer blind, he turned and he saw and he remembered and he did not touch again.

It happened with a hammer. He looked at it, noticed it's polished lining, he reached for it and drew back again. He looked at it and remembered its shape as he always does, he stored it in the back of his mind and turned. Sayu reached for the hammer, she did not draw back.

It was a dance, but it was his dance, his hands and his feeling of unease. He saw himself and he saw her, as if she was no more than glass used for reflections, and he knew that she was glass poorly crafted. He could not make out his own features in hers; the glass was bent in too many places.

It happened with many things, and places, buildings he would not enter but would instead turn his back to and walk down the other way. They would turn and look and call after him, Light, but he would stand guard and say that he didn't want to enter there anyway.

It was, he decided later, a thing that did not love him. Something intangible that drove him off and tasted like rust in his mouth. It rested in metal, in train tracks and in the skeletons of buildings, in hammers and tools. It felt like men and it spoke to him in a mocking laughing tone. It was old and unquestioned and irrelevant.

It was only a dance. Only a game between him and that ancient foreboding poison. There were certain times when he had to walk into the storm, and he would, because it was no more than a game.

Light Yagami learned the rules of the game, all games, in his own shaking hesitant fingers.

* * *

He wasn't so very different from his sister. At times they even managed to look similar, related. Whether this was a trick of the light remained uncertain. He smiled, sometimes, and sometimes he meant it. He spoke little in the beginning and he spoke little in the end, unless he was lying, but then his lies were always so practiced that they may have been true by the time he said them.

People liked to believe that Light Yagami was comprised of masks and that beneath all of them was some truer far different face. Perhaps that was a fair analogy, because his eyes did not always match his thoughts, but in some respects it was lacking.

There was a speck of reality in his words, even those deemed to be lies. If his faces were masks then they were formed of glass. At one point in his life he had seen a mirror and had seen his own reflection. Looking at the eyes he had taken a hammer and the glass cracked beneath. Look at his masks and his reflection would be there disjointed and distorted. Look close enough and one could find his own face, his true face, beneath.

It was what made him so very difficult to categorize. It was also the reason they never guessed and he never told them.

He had often noted that his reflection, that image of his face, was malleable. If he looked at it a certain way, or thought of it a certain way, in front of the mirror his face would shift. Not dramatically, it was still him looking back through amber eyes, but slightly. Look to the left the eyes were a little bit bigger, more innocence. Look down and the hair a bit longer, the eyes unseen, hidden. Look up, bitter. All directions served their purpose in the bathroom mirror.

He recognized as a child that it could become more pronounced, more jagged and harsh and not-subtle-useless, if he wanted it to. Like the forbidding presence in the cities he could sense this twisting power deep within himself but he did not trust it. He did not trust the overt and flamboyant the illusions that seemed too obvious and too different.

Sayu, he knew too, did not have this gift.

Stray too far, he thought in front of the mirror with those wide amber eyes, and he'd find himself lost in the woods without a way back. Some gifts weren't worth it.

Besides, anything that easy couldn't possibly be any fun.

* * *

He never lied. He never would out-right say a not-truth. Like the metal object dance this was older and deep and unquestioned that outright false-words were not to be tampered with. He never tried.

He was always baffled when Sayu, different warped glass Sayu, would say false-words because they seemed so terribly wrong. He would never have tried in the first place.

"Sayu did you do your homework?"

"Yes."

They found the homework undone and untouched and Light sat staring in silence because he could never have given that answer. He took the homework from her and looked it over carefully that night, looking for the pen marks that must have been there, because in his world false-words did not exist could not exist.

But there was nothing.

Sayu was something impossible, ineffable, and different. The reflection shattered and suddenly Light was only Light and Sayu's-brother-friend-neighbor-Light was gone. There was a gulf where there had once been a dim and warped reflection. Light had his first taste of nothingness.

He could never had said those words and the memory of them, their blunt falseness, reigned over his memories until all he could see were their dark shadows.

* * *

He was not surprised when entropy found him, merely disillusioned.

Light decided that it was high time beyond time that he joined the new game. He opened the black notebook and wrote down a word.

* * *

L did not understand the game. To him there were no rules, only conclusions, only end points. Light believed in the journey, L believed in the theory, and in that they differed greatly. Yet, Light considered, no one ever tried so thoroughly before.

He thought that L may have known when his family did not. L certainly thought he knew, and Light found that to others that was what mattered in the end. The thought, a thought, even a false one, was not a lie so long as there was faith.

L stopped at the conclusion because he thought it meant more than the in-between, and in that Light wondered why he bothered in the first place.

He asked the wrong questions because he thought they sound pretty. Light was almost disappointed, but not quite, because the game was still fun. The game was still lasting.

You are Kira he said.

Light disagreed. It's all in the wording. Kira was the game, Kira was the chase the hunt and the pen. Kira was too broad and too asymmetrical to fit on his own features. He tried, he wore it partially, he wore that face in fractions and smiles because it never seemed to fit completely. Or perhaps, he thought, it was that other face, that human face that never fit so well. Perhaps he simply could not wear both.

I know you, L said.

Light's eyebrows raised because there were too many Lights to know. They glittered and they certainly were eye catching but they flashed and fell and even Light had difficulty watching their laughing faces. How could L see all of it, were they fire flies or embers? Light didn't know and he didn't try.

L assumed Light lied and Light said that he did not. He didn't explain that the concept was foreign to him. There were no false words. Words were truth in themselves, they were meaningless and all the meaning there was, words were anything and everything. How could he possibly lie with words?

I will destroy you.

Light had doubts.

* * *

There was a small period of time where he forgot himself. He found himself in a dream facing steel bars with his hand tied in iron behind his back. It was a shaking uneasy phase, not because of the constant accusations, L's eyes always on him which never left but that he had made some forgotten bargain.

He had never tried harder to be human. He knew that too, even as he tried, he knew that he was trying and that he was somehow failing at least in L's opinion. He was failing in his own as well but that hardly mattered. Everything was glossed over, his eyes softer, his face lighter, his thoughts themselves swerved and ordered themselves into human form until nothing was left untouched.

There were still jagged shadows and the smell of pine.

Later once his wayward memories had returned he had observed himself in the mirror watched the thousands of glamours fade from his features until only the jagged mismatched Light Yagami he had always been remained.

He had watched that more familiar face carefully inspecting it for any lingering errors and wondered if his father would recognize this face or not. L certainly recognized it but L seemed to have a small amount of Heritage, the Sight lingered in him till he could almost see but not quite, his family was another matter entirely.

He had always been more or less trying to be human, it was a constant struggle, one not acknowledged by the world around him but necessary none the less. Kira, the notebook, had given him both the excuse to continue and to abandon and he had taken it full heartedly.

He had never been more himself.

A week later he would build L's funeral pyre and watch as he was murdered by Light's own inaction.

* * *

In retrospect L had been something of a luxury in that he had almost understood but not quite. He had been far too caught up in the Kira debacle to look further, to see beyond the murders and into the sheer differences. Still, he had noticed something, which was more liberating than anything Light had known before.

In a world without L Lawliet the glamours held fast and no one seemed to look for further explanation. He found himself riding along the tides of expectation, Misa Amane's, Ryuk's, his father's, everyone looking at him with their dreams in their eyes and him switching faces to merely comply with their demands.

The game had lost its charm, in losing an opponent it had shifted and changed into something that was no longer a game. The game became as mundane as high school had been, as life itself had been, and Light felt a dull longing to be rid of it. Of course, he had fashioned the game himself so he was hesitant to let go to see it perish without his aid.

There were interesting effects regardless that it was no longer a game. He had never pondered what influence his presence would bring in this world, he had always considered himself a reflection of things, something odd and crooked but not influential by any means. Still, the game had proved to be very different than him. Kira had changed things, changed the world, and he wasn't even through yet. No he just kept going, like a wretched train, he hummed along the tracks regardless of what obstacles sat in his path.

He would murder his mother, his sister, even his father all for the sake of an idea.

He smiled at the idea as Misa stood before him in worship, why not, why not let the wretched train ride its path though it might lead to hell? Why not stand aside and watch it blaze ahead in triumph? That had been its purpose after all.

* * *

Ryuk and him never discussed his peculiarities, although he was certain that Ryuk was aware of them. Perhaps to him it made no difference, they are all human in the end, even when they were not.

Still, there were times when he said that Light was more a Shinigami than the Death Gods themselves.

* * *

He had never expected the illusions to last. When he was very young he had seen the threads that wove his world together and realized that one day, perhaps soon even, that they would fray and snap and wither away into nothingness. That thought had terrified him, to know that only one column had to fail for his palace of glass to cave in on itself.

Still even as he had steeled himself for the event, turning his soul into that poisoned metal so that he would not decay once the storm hit, he was not prepared for it.

His father had burned with a lie on his lips, his sister had lost the ability to speak anything at all for fear of waking the dead, and his mother had looked on at all of them with that strange forlorn sadness in her eyes. It had happened so quickly, he wasn't prepared for it.

He stood amid the ashes of his own weavings and recognized his own isolation.

It was then for the first time that he understood humans, their overwhelming emotions and desires, because in his heart there was such passion such infernal longing to destroy everything that had done this to him. To charge on as that locomotive regardless of all consequences for there were no longer any left onward to Hell where they would all find their conclusions.

For the first time he truly became dedicated to his own pretensions, to acknowledge that he would become God of this rotting world even if he must destroy it in the process, and that his throne would be made from the corpses of his enemies all their names printed on their foreheads in silver letters.

This was Kira, the fiery train that barreled onwards, past the illusions and the games and the suffering until the tracks themselves disappeared and the universe extended forever outwards into the horizon.

I am all my faces, he said to himself, even the ones that aren't faces at all.

* * *

The end was three bullets and a stabbing in his heart as his birth name came back to haunt him. Names were such dangerous things, he thought with a tender fondness as his blood dripped down the rusted abandoned stairs.

Life had been a more interesting game than he expected.

Strangely anticlimactic, he had expected them to come for him, or for him to find them. Instead he had found himself, or perhaps he had only found an idea of himself, Kira was a very shallow thing in the end.

That dreaded train had not stopped even for the cliff's edge but that was just as well.

**Author's Note: Or in which Light is Sidhe and a changeling, which is why he is so weird. This was sitting in my files and while bizarre I like it. Thanks for reading reviews are most welcome.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note**


End file.
